Potatoes
Potatoes rotate slowly through the sky:
giant, earthen barges,
majestic spuds, gently turning, shedding dirt
silently, like space stations
or clouds, brown and organic
and when the atmosphere gets too potatoey
it rains tater tots
that stupid people immediately spit out
after catching them in their mouths
because they’re too hot,
fresh from the sky.
Sometimes it lightnings French fries
and hails twice-baked potatoes
shooting through our windows like brimstone
breaking apart along the shards of glass
still sticking out of the sills
streaking everything in the living room
with scalding cheese
and the hot, white fluff of the inner-potato.
Then one afternoon you look up
and the whole sky has gone this totally au gratin
hue, as the wind dies down
and the bottom drops out
of a cumulonimbus
like a fortress of carbs
and it curly-fries tornadoes
peeling back the landscape’s skin, flinging
livestock skyward, and around
like potato salad in a blender
homelessing townsfolk, shredding
belongings, threading telephone
poles through classrooms like toothpicks
through steamed new potatoes
turning trailer parks to hashbrowns
flattening lakeside mansions to latke
reducing the courthouse to a pulverized
pinch of chips and salt in the bottom
corner of the crinkly bag of the city.
Then later that night, the wind dies down
again, and the full moon shines
down on the rubble like an eerily single
scalloped potato,
lonesome
for a whole casserole of others
set against the high, giant darkness
with starch like stars
and you feel like you’re standing
inside the giant, invisible pomme de terre
that is the clear night sky.
Then one day you wake up
and walk outside
and the whole world is covered in a layer
of mashed potatoes
and everything is quiet and bright
the sunlight glowing on it like butter
but soon that layer will melt.
Even now it has begun
revealing a whole
season’s worth of debris beneath
the snow, I mean mashed potatoes
as all the streams of meltwater trickle
all throughout the town.
It’s Spring.
Poem
The imagination
like a brain-attic
floats where one
cannot
see—only images
fallen from it.
Heavens.
